According to the AP, the tens of thousands of kids who live on bases aren’t covered by military law, and federal prosecutors often don’t pursue juvenile sexual assault cases. That leaves some victims without closure and young offenders without the treatment they need, the AP investigation found.

Assaults and rapes reported by juveniles on military bases rarely make it to the desks of prosecutors, because investigators shelve them, despite them being required to pursue the allegations, according to the AP. And if the reports do make it to prosecutors, they regularly don’t make it much further, even if the attacker confesses, the investigation found.

The Pentagon doesn't do much to track the scope of the problem, but the AP found that there have been nearly 600 sexual assault cases on a military base since 2007. The Justice Department, which could help resolve some of the accusations, isn’t equipped to handle cases involving juveniles. Federal prosecutors pursued just one in seven juvenile sex offenses out of the ones presented to them by military investigators, the AP found.

“The military is designed to kill people and break things,” former Army criminal investigator Russell Strand, one of the military's pioneering experts on sexual assault told the AP. “The primary mission, it's not to deal with kids sexually assaulting kids on federal property.”

Strand told the AP that in the Army alone, his colleagues decided not to pursue hundreds of sex assault cases involved offenders under 14 years old. James Trusty, an attorney and longtime Justice Department section chief, told the AP that federal prosecutors were “allergic” to any case involving juveniles.

According to the AP, of about 100 juvenile-on-juvenile sex assault investigations on Navy and Marine Corps bases over the last 10 years, 74 cases were referred to federal prosecutors who pursued just 11 cases. Compare that to local prosecutors, who were presented with 29 cases and acted on 11. A previous AP investigation from May, 2017, highlighted the issue of young people sexually assaulting others. Between the fall of 2011 and spring of 2015, the AP revealed 17,000 official reports of sexual assaults committed by students against their classmates in grades K through 12 across the county.

But beyond these official reports, sexual assaults are already widely underreported, according to RAINN. Only 310 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults of all people are reported to police, and for members of the military, just 43% of female victims and 10% of male victims report their assault.

The Defense Department told the AP it “takes seriously any incident impacting the well-being of our service members and their families,” in response to their report. They promised they would take the “appropriate actions” to help young people involved in sex assaults, and said it was “not aware of any juvenile sex offender treatment specialists” working in the military or its school system. The military's school system did, however, say that student safety is its highest priority, that school officials must report any incidents, and that "a single report of sexual assault is one too many," the AP reports.

Still, some said they need to do more.

“These are the children that we need to be protecting, the children of our heroes,” said Heather Ryan, a former military investigator told the AP.